In an article by Adam Jimenez in webdevnews.net, the topic of discussion was ShiftEdit, an online IDE that works with Mozilla Skywriter and ExtJS.

According to Adam, ShiftEdit is a final frontier of applications brought to the web. He adds that the IDE is an attempt to develop from any PC or OS. This means that top web developers do not need to install external software in order to have the ultimate developing experience. It also translates into not having to develop site definitions – also an extraneous task.

Among the key features included in ShiftEdit are the following:

Talking about the code editor, its has its foundations on Bespin from Mozilla. And it also supports block tabbing, line numbers, jump to line, undo/redo, syntax highlighting for html/css/js and php and most of all it’s super fast.

Additionally, ShiftEdit has FTP support. This means there is a FTP explorer built in that supports SFTP and FTP. This enables users to form, rename and delete folders and files. It also allows developers to select file permissions.

The find/replace function on ShiftEdit is enabled throughout open files or current ones. This enables you to perform text search and the typical expression search.

In addition, the revision history may be stored when a file is saved. You may come up with various comparisons when you revert back via past revisions. You may even restore to the former version. This can come in handy if you break something inadvertently.